Today, more than 18% of all financial institutions have tested the waters of blogging, but few are generating any value from it. Despite that, blogging is recognized as one of the key tools for omnichannel marketing, enabling banks to develop content that can be consumed across platforms to offer value to readers and to drive organic search traffic. Banks can make use of a blog, provided they take steps to build a customer-centric blog that offers real value to its readers and consumers. Developing bank blog ideas means understanding your customers/prospects and what they are interested in reading. Approaching content with a smart strategy rather than simply trying to sell products will help your bank generate quality traffic and readers that will drive overall revenue.

Develop an Overall Blog Strategy

The first step in building out ideas for your bank’s blog isn’t creating a list of topics, it’s understanding your customers, how often they want to connect, what value the blog will drive. You must also identify how and when to promote your blog across digital channels, which means connecting your blogging strategy to social media, amongst other content strategies.

One approach is to integrate your blogging strategy into your sales cycle, developing a content calendar reflecting what people are most likely to buy, search for, and need at each time during the year. Chances are, your bank has enough historical data to create strong and valuable predictions surrounding when product interest will peak, allowing you to develop blog ideas around those points. For example, taxes in April and savings plans in January.

Approaching your bank’s blog based on what your customers need will give you the opportunity to offer real value when it’s needed, rather than guessing at what they want. And, if your blog aligns with your other marketing efforts, you’ll have more information to share and strengthen your ads and social media posts. Achieving this strategy requires a strong collaborative effort between sales and marketing.

Generate Interesting Content

It doesn’t matter how interesting your blog ideas are if your content is boring. Too often, marketing teams start out with great blog ideas and eventually end up with a product promotion barely disguised as useful content. If you can’t add personality, creativity, and interest to your posts, you’re likely better off without them. Many other industries succeed by integrating humor, building content in multiple formats (video, infographic, written text), and trying to approach content from the customer’s point of view. Basically, if you are writing a blog post that is disguised as an advertisement, create a real ad instead. Keep your blog posts interesting and informative.

Bank Blog Ideas That Are Valuable

If you’re trying to source ideas, the truth is there’s no one size fits all solution. Anyone can, and everyone does, write about credit scores and retirement savings, but what does that say about your bank. While your core topics need to be financial and should be valuable to readers, you should try to keep them as local as possible.

That means identifying and tackling customers pain points, offering free tools and solutions, creating directories and pointers, breaking down your own services when you know customers struggle with them, introducing local initiatives, championing causes, and actively working to share customer stories. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. What would you want to read? Better yet, consider your own bank or another service you use, what do you read on their blog? Why? Chances are, the same rules will apply when you consider it from your bank’s point of view.

Most banks struggle with blogging because it requires a shift from logical and direct marketing to value-added marketing, where your primary goal is engagement, not sales. Making that shift means identifying your members and their specific needs and stories and using that as a source of credit union blog ideas, rather than pulling from a generic source of savings and loan investment advice. How can you get started? Who’s your oldest member? Is there a specific customer who has been through extraordinary circumstances? Will they share their stories? Chances are your bank is engaged in rebuilding, community, family, and actually helping people to achieve their dreams and those stories tie into your credit union and products as much or more than any amount of product promotion.